Its funny, you talk about pvp gear giving certain people big advantages, but so doesn't raid gear give advantage to those without., same principle. Maybe not everyone wants to raid or buy a bunch Kronos to sell for gear. Maybe its not the gear really, maybe its a few way overtuned classes in pvp that pushed people away from wanting to pvp, now the fire seeds....pvp is really in a why bother situation currently.
Sometimes I feel like I am playing on a different server or playing a different game totally with some of the info that gets posted here in these forums. None of what you posted about itemization or contested content makes any sense to me given that you don't support pvp gear. The few scraps of pvp gear they gave us in KOS were reasonablly itemized and did generate pvp. We don't have that in EOF and at a minimum thats what people want. 90% of the best gear is hidden behind uncontested content in EOF other than the pumpkin horseman epic and CMM. If you are making the point that all content should be contested for pvp purposes then I agree with you but clearly that will not happen. Having multiple methods to obtain gear by either pvp or pve with accomodate players diff playstyles and make the server thrive. Forcing everyone to play one way or buy gear from the bots will result in what you have right now, a dead server 3 weeks into the EOF expac.
Plat dupers who forced a rollback, plus exploiters and those who continually griefed new players (especially w/the mentoring exploits in-game at the beginning) emptied out the server just after launch.
It was entirely the rollback that killed the server not that there was all that many people to begin with.
The rollback was slight and didn't kill anything except the cheaters. The only lasting problem from those cheaters was the change to fuel sellback costs to zero. They did that change because cheaters tried to 'hide' stolen plats in stockpiles of fuel. They should have made fuel bought in mass on those couple days useless, no destroy stackless pieces of junk. Filling their bags/banks and overflow forever. Those cheaters now get to craft for free or transfer to another server and craft free with free high lvl fuels. (all tiers of fuel are sold on pvp server) Anyway the quest loots/zones loots good enough, there's lots to do in eq2 game, servers not dead. I see and meet some new to server people almost everyday!
If you don't have a Consumable economy player driven PVP servers don't last doesn't matter the game. Every thing in PVP must be player driven, economy , Crafting , controlling certain area for raw materials . PVP is a team sport Not a Solo PVE. Gear is irrelevant , that's what crafting is for , raw material for crafting magical Gear. That can be damaged and repaired (Certain skill level to even repair it) . Non-magic gear can be destroyed and new gear will have to crafted. PVE just sets up the Gank . Yes PVP is Ganking PVE Players but PVE is s must for crafting certain rare items that only can be found in the world and gaining faction with NPCs. This will then set-up Bigger fights with whole Guild in a all battle with Allies . And Yes players have alts . Everyone is a Spy. Stats are simple so it comes down to tactics not tricks with the script. PVE sets up the PVP encounters. Some How Sony and DB lost this simple concept.
Everyone has their reason why they quit, it's not like there is one thing. For me it was the lack of class balance and the fact that the classes I enjoy playing were not bruiser or conjuror. A secondary reason was the extremely low population causing lack of pvp and difficulty getting pve pugs.
